The sea all around is pitch-black but on the boat we enjoy warmth and light. The waters are calm, not like they were yesterday. Yesterday I was sitting in a car by the sea with two friends, watching the angry waves breaking on the shore and hurling themselves fiercely against the cliffs. Tall towers of white foam rose gracefully all along the shore, each trying to outdo the others in the height reached.
It was an awesome sight. It had a strange terrifying fascination for us. I wondered what it would be like to dive into the waves and be swept ashore. Would I be dashed against the rocks and be broken to pieces? I had no intention of testing it. I was glad it was the following day I was to travel. The sea was too rough for the boat to sail in such a gale.
Today has been mild and warm. The boat sailed on time. Suddenly, the lights of the port ahead are visible, twinkling and glowing in the surrounding darkness. "Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. The night is dark and I am far from home."
A flash of inspiration on the road to Damascus, a dawning of truth breaks into the dark recesses of the soul. Emerging from the dark cave of prejudice and ignorance and cowardice, we stand blinking in the realisation of enlightenment. So accustomed are we to the shadows, we take time to adjust to the brightness.
We disembark, having safely crossed the miles of dark water. I am returning from a trip to join old school friends at their annual reunion. The reminiscences, dating back to 1940, were all happy memories, images of light, unmarred by any dark patches. Two hundred voices in unison singing the old school song: "Dreams will drift o'er you like soft-scented rain. Then as of old you will be of our numbers in the arena of school days again," brought tears to our eyes.
One voice was silent, mine. I remember being told long ago that when on stage I was to mouth the words but not dare allow a sound to escape.
Why am I so taken with the darkness? Why was my voice silent while everyone else was singing with so much emotion and fervour? Sitting on the train, I find myself going back in memory to 1935, when I started primary school at the age of seven.
Why so late a start? The nearest Protestant school was 14 miles away, two miles by bicycle, 11 miles by train and one mile's walk across the city, not a journey to be undertaken any earlier than seven. The idea of attending the local Catholic school was unthinkable. Apartheid wasn't a phenomenon peculiar to South Africa!
I arrived each morning half an hour late and left half an hour early in the afternoon to fit in with train times which gave me one hour less of hell. Wasn't I fortunate?
Two months was enough for me at that school. We moved to another town later in the year. The school there was no happier. I had three years to wait before I finally found myself happy at school.
I see myself standing with a fellow-pupil on a sloping desk during a singing lesson. A tonic solfa chart hangs over an easel. A long wooden pointer demands the rendering of a note. A tuning fork gives the pitch for doh. Go up through the scale, down again. Vary the order of the notes, doh, soh, te, doh, me, ray, doh. The pointer darts about in a staccato, peremptory, menacing succession. This wasn't a rehearsal for "The Sound of Music".
My vocal chords are paralysed. I try to produce the sounds but nothing comes save an inaudible choking gasp. The aspen leaves quiver in the breeze. I quiver in fear and trembling. A nervous giggling has landed us on top of that sloping desk, our pinnacle of shame. It's an effort to keep our balance.
A picture floats before my eyes, a dark portrait of two boys called "Wolf". They are bare-footed, unloved, hungry, unwashed, friendless. They fail to recite their five times tables. They falter and look blank. They have no spirit left in them. They wait, resigned to their fate.
The teacher confronts them, her face twisted in a paroxysm of rage. She shakes them as if they were rag dolls and bangs their heads repeatedly against the wall. They don't cry out. I feel sick. I feel fear. I want to cry out. "Stop it! You'll kill them. Can't you see they've had no breakfast, no love, no wash? There's no lunch in their satchels. How can they recite their wretched tables!?"
I said nothing. I remained one of the silent majority. I didn't speak out. In time I'd emerge from the darkness of cowardice and fear into the light of courage and justice.
At the age of seven I was no David facing Goliath with a sling. I wonder if those boys survived the harshness of their childhood. They were born to be victims in a cruel world.
Another day I tried to be a David but Goliath proved too strong for me. I hadn't yet learnt to use my sling.
Like the Wolf brothers there was a girl, poor, unloved, hungry, with no lunch in her satchel. I had a dainty lunch wrapped in greaseproof paper - cream crackers, a triangle of cream cheese in silver wrap and a banana. I had parents who cared. How vividly I can now recall that lunch! I couldn't eat it in front of three hungry children. I've forgotten the girl's name but I remember her asking me if she could have the lunch.
I told her to go into the classroom and take the lunch from my satchel. The other children accused her of stealing it. They turned into a pack of wolves about to tear their prey to pieces. Like a hunted fox, the girl fled to me. "Tell them," she pleaded. "Tell them you gave me your lunch."
"I gave her my lunch," I cried. "I'm not hungry. I don't want it. I gave her my lunch."
They took no notice. "Run to the teacher. Tell her I gave you the lunch. She'll save you," I said.
She ran, the pack close on her heels. What happened next I can hardly bear to recall. The teacher came to the door, pushed the girl away and locked the door on her and on us. What an example of misplaced trust! The girl faced her hunters with a look of terror and abandonment on her face. The mob relaxed. Perhaps, like me, they were taken aback by the teacher's reaction.
I can't lock away my memory of that day. During my two months at that school my future angry, rebellious spirit was born. How proud I was of my daughter when she was but a few years old and yet twice tackled grown-ups who were being unkind and unfair to another child.
Why have I suddenly recalled these episodes as I sit on this train on my way home from a happy reunion with old school friends from boarding school? Was it the dark sea and all the associations it has evoked? Did remembering my happy days at boarding school remind me of earlier sad days?
Recently I received some old photographs from the son of the headmaster of the first school I taught in. I'd met Douglas in Oxford in May. Among the photographs was one of "I W." the teacher I've been describing. Douglas told me that she had been in college with his mother. In the photograph I see two 18-year old girls, laughing in the sunshine as they pose for the camera. Sixty-six years haven't dimmed my memory of her face. I recognise which of the two she is.
I stare and stare and try to see the cruelty that was to strike such terror through my young heart 10 years after the photograph was taken. Did she know what she was doing? Did she ever in the darkness and silence of the night experience a flash of conscience? Did she ever wonder what became of those wretched boys? Did she recognise what she had done in locking the door?
We had a lovely evening at the reunion, recalling our days in boarding school. During the end-of-term Christmas carol service a group of my friends would sing, "A bar of sunlight soap came down and they began to scrub" as a parody on "An angel of the Lord came down and they began to sing."
I didn't sing. I never sing. My first singing lesson silenced me forever!